The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010

Ray Jackendoff

Accessible to a wide audience of linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists

Meaning and the Lexicon

The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010

Ray Jackendoff

Description

Meaning and the Lexicon brings together 35 years of pathbreaking work on language by Ray Jackendoff. It traces the development of his Parallel Architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent generative components, and in which knowledge of language consists of a repertoire of stored structures. Some of these structures, such as words and morphemes, are idiosyncratic mappings between phonology, syntax, and meaning; some, such as idioms, attach meaning to larger syntactic structures; other structures are purely syntactic or morphosyntactic; and yet others are pieces of meaning with no syntactic or phonological form. The Parallel Architecture also seeks to explain and understand how language is integrated with human cognition, particularly with
vision.

Professor Jackendoff examines inherently meaningful syntactic constructions, incorporating insights from Construction Grammar; and he looks at how aspects of meaning can be unexpressed but nevertheless understood, integrating approaches from Generative Lexicon theory. A recurring focus is the balance in grammar between idiosyncrasy, regularity, and semiregularity. The chapters cover a wide range of phenomena, from well-studied domains such as the mass-count distinction, event structure, resultatives, and noun-noun compounds, to offbeat aspects of English grammar such as the time-away construction (We're twistin' the night away), contrastive focus reduplication (Do you LIKE-him-like him?) and the noun-preposition-noun construction (week after week).

Ray
Jackendoff draws on work in a wide range of fields, including linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy. His writing combines depth of thought with clarity and wit. Meaning and the Lexicon will be read and enjoyed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions, and will be of great interest to cognitive scientists, philosophers, and anyone interested in how language operates in the mind, brain, and human communication.

Meaning and the Lexicon

The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010

Ray Jackendoff

Table of Contents

1. prologue: The Parallel Architecture and its Components2. Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexicon3. On Beyond Zebra: The Relation of Linguistics and Visual Information4. The Architecture of the Linguistic-Spatial Interface5. Parts and Boundaries6. The Proper Treatment of Measuring Out, Telicity, and Perhaps Even Quantification in English7. English Particle Constructions, the Lexicon, and the Autonomy of Syntax8. Twistin' the Night Away9. The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions, co-authored by Adele E. Goldberg10. On The phrase The Phrase 'the phrase'11. Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (the salad-salad paper)12. Construction After Construction and its
Theoretical Challenges13. The Ecology of English Noun-Noun CompoundsReferences

Meaning and the Lexicon

The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010

Ray Jackendoff

Author Information

Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is a member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe institute, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. His books include Semantics and Cognition (MIT 1972), Consciousness and the Computational Mind (MIT 1987), The Architecture of the Language Faculty (MIT 1995), Foundations of Language (OUP 2002), Simpler Syntax (co-authored with Peter Culicover) (OUP 2005), and Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (MIT 2007).